Worth: the quality that renders something desirable or valuable.
Worthy: having the qualities that deserve action or regard.
Characterised by good intent, but lacking in humour.
A person notable in a particular sphere.
Synonyms: virtuous, good, ethical, high-principled, right-thinking, noble, righteous, venerable, conscientious, trustworthy, dependable, exemplary.
Antonyms: disreputable, unworthy. Nobody.
I was fifteen years old, and as I walked home through the grey winter, I knew that I was worthy of nothing at all.
When my school report came, Dad was silent. I waited for him to shout at me, but he wouldn’t. My mum shouted until she wept. Her skin was dark as burnt mahogany, her hair was already grey at the temples, cut to a perfect scalp around her skull. She wore a carrots and cauliflowers apron when she cooked, which she did five nights a week unless Dad was on night shifts, in which case he cooked before going out. When I was ten she said, “You will now learn how to cook!” and I sensed that this was not a matter on which there would be any arguing. Nyaring Ayun-Arden, my mum, co-ordinated customer service at the council-housing office and was a good cook, even though she loved sardines more than anything else.
“It’s just wonderful!” she exclaimed. “It’s fish, in a tin, for 16p!”
My dad said he’d met my mother at a community event.
My mum laughed and said, “You call it that!”
I ignored this as a silly adult joke, until one day my aunt Carol whispered, “Your mum walked across Sudan and up through Egypt, walked until she got to Istanbul, came to this country in the back of a truck and got work sorting laundry for the hotels, but ended up begging after they said they couldn’t pay immigrants minimum wage. Your dad picked her up, put her in the cells for a night, gave her a cuppa tea and a microwaved meal. Three years later she was running the reception desk at the big council office in the centre of town, and he’d just made sergeant. Your dad had forgotten her, but she didn’t forget, not your mum, and that was lucky for him.”
The year I was born, my mother’s sister, left behind in Sudan, also gave birth and called her child Sorrow. My mother, unaware of this, or even that her sister was alive, called me Hope. Her family were Neur, but to advance their lot in life, my grandfather had insisted they all learned Arabic, in the hope his children would one day enter the civil service. The civil service would not have them, but my mother sang to me in Arabic in my crib, and cursed in Arabic, and paced up and down the room berating me in Arabic, with the words, first in one language, then another, “You will speak many languages and have the opportunities I did not!”
As a child, I heard these words as condemnation. She had not had opportunities, and so now was forcing me, her daughter, to live the life she could not. It took until after I had lost my family for me to understand what she was trying to say.
“For a copper to marry an immigrant, particularly at that time,” mused my aunt, “it says a lot about their love. But then, your dad always was a good man first, and a copper second; it’s why his career’s been so slow. And your mum… she’s always believed in people. That’s why she called you Hope.”
Chapter 11
Walking barefoot away from a robbery in Dubai.
I don’t exit the hotel directly, not yet. If I do, someone with a lot of patience could pull camera footage, assess who was there when the power went, who was not there when it came back on. The comparison would yield my face.
Most police forces don’t have the time, and time is money. But the Dubai police is commanded by prince someone who is a relative of prince someone, and while a petty theft, a little assault, a touch of domestic or sexual abuse might slide for want of time and energy, no one lays a finger on a member of the royal family.
So I waited.
I put the diamonds in a plastic bag in the cistern of the third toilet along in the ground-floor ladies. In Hollywood crime capers, a bumbling fool and their winsome child will stumble on my stolen goods; japes ensue, love is found and I end up as villain, femme fatale perhaps, for it is narratively impossible for me to be anything other than a sexual predator, as well as a criminal mastermind.
As it is, the police, when they arrive, immediately set to interrogating the hotel staff, pulling grown men around by the scruff of the neck, hollering in the faces of the Filipino maids, while the expats and dignitaries mingle together in shock and excitement, for this is just the most thrilling thing that has happened for a long while and they will dine out on it for years to come.
A man in the lobby, screaming down his phone. The woman dressed all in black stands behind him, watching without expression.
“At my fucking party!” he screams. “At my fucking party stole her fucking jewels do you know what this fucking does for us, do you know how much we’ve just fucking lost…?!”
The elevator doors close, cutting him off from my view.
In my bedroom I lie down, back straight, arms on my chest.
Breathe.
Once.
Twice.
Watch the reflection of the water on the ceiling.
Discipline.
Every day: some form of exercise.
Every day: some form of social interaction.
Discipline.
I close my eyes, and breathe.
Chapter 12
I was forgotten when I was sixteen.
Why then?
My parents loved me, there was no doubt. But when my sister was born, she needed almost constant attention. Little Gracie, who at four years old caught measles off a kid in nursery whose mother thought the MMR jab was poison.
“See?” she hollered, as my sister was rushed to A&E with a fever of 41 °C. “She had the jab and what good has it done her?”
I thought Mum was going to slap her, and when Dad drove me home, Mum still sat in the ICU, he almost hit a cyclist, and we had to wait in the bus lane for ten minutes while he got his breath back.
Doctors are taught the three Cs for diagnosing measles: cough, conjunctivitis and coryza (blocked nose to you and me). You could also add a K — Koplik’s spots. Clustered white lesions on the buccal mucosa. They appear as little white marks, like grains of salt, around the inner lining of the cheek where it joins with the molars. Early detection can lead to a quick diagnosis before full infectiousness is achieved. We did not detect them early; we didn’t know to look.
At 42 °C organs start taking damage. I was allowed to miss school, and wished for the first time that I wasn’t, as the rash spread across Gracie’s body.
It was fifteen days before my sister was allowed home. After nine months, it was obvious that she had suffered brain damage. The mother of the unvaccinated child came over three days after we took Grace out of nursery. She stood in the door, a small woman with a rainbow scarf, and talked low to my mum, and at the end she was crying, and so was Mum, though neither raised their voices, and I never saw her again.
I think it began then, in the months and years that followed the measles.
Slowly, a piece at a time, I began to diminish, and the world began to forget.
Chapter 13
Thirteen hours after I planted the diamonds in the women’s toilets, I reclaimed them, and checked out of the hotel.
The Dubai — Muscat bus was a sleek, air-conditioned cruiser that drove at unchanging, ponderous speed down the middle of the giant, sparse highway for six and a half hours, two of which were spent in a maze of border crossings. Emirati officials glanced at my American passport and weren’t interested. The Indians and Pakistanis heading to Oman were subjected to several hours of speculation.